Chapter 337: O Dragon, O Dragon! Part Three
Sunraku: “NGYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!”
Screaming my lungs out, I slammed Areadbhair Rebuild into a “tree” with such bullshit durability that it was starting to inspire genuine murderous intent. The blazing blade fulfilled the purpose of its very existence, burning through a trunk so fleshy—and so freakishly thick—that it almost looked like a grotesquely swollen arm.
And it was still hard as hell. I could not cut through the core.
Sunraku: “Bad, bad, bad! Deep Throater, we don’t have enough DPS!!”
Deep Throater: “I think what we’re missing isn’t DPS, it’s manpower!? Come on, Sunraku-kun, this is where you split yourself into copies or something! Then you and me can have a three-wayyy!!”
Flesh Tree: “Pya...”
Sunraku & Deep Throater: “Ah.”
The “flesh-seeds” fired from the back of the Great Red Devourer buried themselves in the ground and immediately grew into enormous trees of meat that were... honestly hard to describe.
No, actually, there was one perfectly good word for them: disgusting.
Any player with even a little experience would know what this kind of object meant. Leave something like this alone and it almost always turned into trouble. And after roughly one minute...
The flesh tree literally burst.
Flesh Tree: “PYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!”
Sunraku: “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!?”
I braced Dis Pater, Nether King’s Mirror Shield in front of me and took a defensive stance as a blast of meat, blood, and a shockwave from who-knew-what slammed into me.
I realized almost immediately that there was no way I could absorb all of it head-on, so instead I let the force carry me backward, practically rolling through the air as I was blown away.
I was not using Levin Trigger: Hazard. If I did, I would almost certainly die.
There was absolutely no way to maintain a no-damage run in this fight. The explosion from one of these flesh trees blew away something like sixty percent of the battle area, and the Great Red Devourer could plant five of them at once.
In other words, taking damage was guaranteed. There was no getting around it.
Sunraku: “Trees aren’t supposed to fucking scream...”
Deep Throater: “The main body’s cominggg!”
And above all else, these things were only optional parts. The actual boss still attacked us normally on top of all that.
They really had no intention of letting a small group clear this, huh? Well, it was a raid.
I recovered from the knockback, got back on my feet, and dodged the charge of the bright-red monster as it came rushing in with its tongue stretched out.
Five minutes had passed since the fight began, and it looked like Deep Throater had finally started getting used to its movements. The punching bag from the start of the battle was nowhere to be seen now; the Sage was smoothly evading attacks with a battle style I had seen before, so I retreated toward them.
Sunraku: “First thing we need to do is deal with those trees or we’re gonna spend the whole fight getting pinballed around. We’ve got no choice but to focus fire one of them down and cut ourselves a safe zone.”
Deep Throater: “Mmm... judging from the timing of when it plants the seeds, I think we could just barely dodge them at the last second...”
But that would not be enough.
Merely responding to a gimmick would only drag us into a slow loss. We had to deal with the gimmick and keep shaving down the main body at the same time or we would get nowhere.
Areadbhair’s special effectiveness seemed to be working, because it was doing more than a normal slash would. But “effective” was a long way from “decisive.”
Great Red Devourer: “QYARORORORORORORORORORORO!!”
The Great Red Devourer’s back writhed as it sprayed out a noise like somebody playing a recorder unbelievably badly.
The place where its back probably used to look like a dragon’s back had become something like peering into a bright-red pot where chopped-up ingredients had been thrown together and boiled with no care whatsoever.
Three severed tyrannosaur heads bobbed up and down like potatoes rising and sinking through tomato soup, scattering groans that sounded halfway between roars and death cries. Several other kinds of dinosaur-like creatures—probably victims—were packed in there too, and every now and then I could catch glimpses of the two elves it had absorbed.
Oh. One of them just got shoved under by a severed head and sank.
You guys are still being that timid even after death...? Funny as that would normally be, this was not a situation where I could laugh it off. This game had no pause button. The situation was always moving.
Sunraku: “Deep Throater!”
Deep Throater: “New motionnn! What is it, what is it?”
Must be nice being in the back line and having enough breathing room to sound that relaxed. I did not have a single second to let my guard down over here.
A red object like a crushed tomato launched out of the Great Red Devourer’s back with a wet, pulpy sound.
It was not one of the flesh-seeds. Those had been a little smaller, and it fired five of them at once. Which meant this was a different action entirely.
The red mass smacked against the ground with exactly the wet splatch its appearance suggested. It began changing shape with a horrible squelching noise that was deeply unhealthy for my mental state...
And then it produced some kind of malformed dinosaur: one severed tyrannosaur head with multiple raptor bodies attached to it.
SLF had a huge variety of monsters, sure, but even by this game’s standards, that was not normal.
It was obviously a chimera—no, even calling it a chimera felt too generous. This “thing,” born from the crudest possible addition problem, linked several bodies together and charged at us while using the enormous tyrannosaur head like the blade of a bulldozer.
Sunraku: “What the hell... So basically?”
It crudely mixed together whatever it had eaten and turned the result into monsters...?
Even though NPCs were valid prey too?
............I see.
Sunraku: “Okay. Three days and three nights if that’s what it takes—I’ll keep you pinned here the whole damn time.”
This was the kind of monster that absolutely could not be allowed to encounter NPCs.
Not because I was especially heartbroken at the idea of NPCs getting eaten, but because whatever came out afterward would probably not be something I could laugh while killing.
Chimera Spawn: “GuWrrriririaaaaaaaaa!!”
Sunraku: “Shut up for a second.”
An enemy charging with an enormous weight for a head was easy enough to handle. I did not merely dodge it; I followed along beside it and hacked the tyrannosaur half of its face to pieces with Areadbhair.
As though responding to my slightly lowered excitement and far higher motivation, Areadbhair scattered flames everywhere. By the time the Great Red Devourer itself—whose attention Deep Throater had quietly been holding—turned its aggro toward me, the chimera it had spawned had lost whatever force was keeping it together.
It spread across the ground as a pool of matter somewhere between solid and liquid.
Sunraku: “How much ammo have you got left? If you’ve got a feeding animation, that obviously means there’s some kind of ‘hunger’ system too, right?”
If it could produce these things infinitely, that would be pure despair. But this game tended to be pretty strict about the concept of consumption in situations like this.
I’m trusting you here, Ritsu Amachi...
The Great Red Devourer had the shape of a dragon, but there was very little about its movements that felt biological.
Its neck was already half torn off, its chest had fallen apart so badly that “wardrobe malfunction” was giving way to “organs straight-up falling out,” and even now pieces of its bloodlike body were dripping onto the ground...
Wait.
Hold on.
Sunraku: “...!”
I looked down.
The malformed tyrannosaur had collapsed into a shapeless puddle beneath me. Looking around more carefully, I saw the same kind of red pools in the places where the flesh trees had exploded.
Sunraku: “Residual objects...? Just visual effects? No... or maybe...”
The worst possibility I could think of.
The victims on its back were constantly forming out of that melted soup, taking shape, sinking back down, and dissolving again.
Which meant they were moving from an amorphous state into a fixed state, right?
Then... no, but...
Could it be?
Could the reverse be possible too?
Sunraku: “...Tch. Deep Throater!!”
Deep Throater: “Yeees!?”
Sunraku: “Watch those red pools! They reek of a trigger flag!!”
Deep Throater: “Maybe what you’re smelling is my feminine scent...”
The sex of somebody who could freely change their voice, character, and play style was less trustworthy than which side of a coin would land face-up.
Deep Throater: “More importantlyyy! Sunraku-kuuun! When I attack these blood pools, I get damage effects!!”
Sunraku: “And there’s our confirmation, goddammit!”
Before the next curse could even escape my mouth, the Great Red Devourer—whose entire body had been convulsing—burst.
Yes.
Exactly like a water balloon.
Sunraku: “Ahh... what, are you some kind of relative of Mud Digger?”
The ground, which had looked like badly maintained grassland, was now covered in brilliant crimson pools.
That writhing I could feel beneath my feet—was it transmitting something?
Or were they all... connected?
The tyrannosaur-head-plus-multiple-raptor-bodies chimera is basically a super-gross minion that moves like a handcart being pushed backward.